MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "I'm going to sit here. And you're going to drive."

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MooT Clue-in-the-Cast: Jeanne Crain is Ruth Bowman, Michael Rennie is Dr. Paul Manning, and Carl Betz is John Bowman, a/k/a Third Officer Jack Barlowe.

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Another sequence of closeups of Jean Seberg from Garrel's "Les Hautes Solitudes." You can check out the first part here.

In the golden age of jet travel, Hollywood stars were often photographed deplaning at airports across the globe in staged photo ops engineered by agents and studios.

In those days, rolling stairways were wheeled up to the planes to allow passengers on and off. The stars were allowed off first, and the shutterbugs, gathered at the base, clicked away for a few minutes.

Here, a positively concupiscent M² exits a radar-equipped Lockheed Super Constellation, or "Connie," in TWA livery, sometime in the 1950s.

Marilyn's livery ain't too shabby either!

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "We go together, Annie. I don't know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together."

Ahhhh, my favorite girl with a gun, all-time.

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Gee, four different versions of "You Don't Mess with the Zohan," and this Cold War noir is not available in any format! It's a crime, I tells ya!

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "Behavioral note. An infected male exposed himself to sunlight today. Now it's possible decreased brain function or growing scarcity of food is causing them to ... ignore their basic survival instincts. Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent."

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In "The Love God?" (1969), America's dweeb Don Knotts — by my reckoning somewhere between Barney Fife and Ralph Furley on the sexual maturation scale — plays human tadpole Abner A. Peacock IV (the A stands for Audubon). He's the owner of a bird-watching magazine (The Peacock) about to go the way of the Dodo owing to low circulation.

To the rescue comes a conniving pornographer who's recently lost his fourth-class mailing permit, one Osborn Tremaine (Edmund O'Brien). Tremaine, backed by mob money, agrees to buy Peacock's foundering publication and save him from bankruptcy.

(Something tells me that Robert Towne had nothing to do with this script.)

What Tremaine doesn't tell the gullible ornithologist is that he really wants The Peacock's unsullied mailing privileges so he can keep his "artistic vision" as a publisher of photos of the naked female form alive. While the relieved bird-watcher is in South America looking for a rare bird, O'Brien turns the staid journal into a racy skin mag a la Playboy, keeping only the title. He even makes his busty wife, Evelyn (Maureen Arthur), The Peacock's first "un-cover girl." Talk about a hostile takeover!

When he returns home, the virginal Abner — dubbed "Dirty Abner" in absentia by the press — is promptly arrested on the spot as a smut peddler.

His case comes to the attention of self-serving lawyer Darrell Evans Hughes (James Gregory), who takes up Abner's defense to make a name for himself with what he figures is gonna be a landmark civil liberties suit.

Here's the Attorney General's opening salvo, which is delivered inter-cut with close-ups of the bug-eyed Knotts, who acted with his whole head (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, lips, cheeks, and chin):

Look at his face! It is the face of a smut-monger. Look at his body, THIN, wasted away by the sin and debauchery of a life of unspeakable orgies and depravity…He does look innocent, until you look into his eyes. They’re the eyes of a man obsessed by sex ... a man whose lust knows no bounds. The Marquis de Sade would have regarded Abner Peacock as a peer in his search for lechery.

Then Hughes retorts in Peacock's defense:

It is sick, unsavory creatures like Abner Peacock who test the strength of our Constitution which like a Rock of Gibraltar has withstood challenge after challenge in protecting our freedom of the press down through the years. Now, ladies and gentlemen, are we to stand idly by and allow the first crack to be made in this rock because of this dirty little pornographer? This is a dirty case and a dirty little man. It is with disgust to the point of nausea that I find myself sitting next to this filthy little degenerate, but when I see this filthy little degenerate’s Constitutional rights being threatened, then I must take this filthy little degenerate, clasp him to my breast, and fight for this filthy little degenerate’s rights and liberties with my very life!

And with that you wonder: Hughes is on HIS side???

Long story short, Abner is acquitted thanks to Hughes' persuasive oratory, and becomes America's poster-child for First Amendment rights. But before he can tell the truth about how his magazine was hijacked from him, he is convinced by Tremaine and his own money-grubbing family that it is his patriotic duty to keep publishing "pornography."

Pornography, by "Love God" standards anyway, is embodied by glossy pix of busty bikini babes, which is a pretty tame proposition today. Strange that this film came to VHS and now DVD tagged with a PG-13 rating, which was invented in 1984 in response to parental protests over certain "intense" scenes in "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark." In 1969, the rating up from G was M, for Mature audiences only, and that's what the "The Love God?" got. Knotts in "an M" undoubtedly stirred a lot of curiousity back then.

Anyway, the resulting publicity draws major league advertising dollars to The Peacock, and Abner decides that if it's to succeed, he must play his role of playboy filth-monger to the hilt. And — with the help of shady money man J. Charles Twilight (B. S. Pulley) and manipulative co-editor Lisa LaMonica (Anne "Honey West" Francis) — he does, becoming a faux-fur-wearin', hipper-than-thou combo of Austin Powers, Hugh Hefner, and the groovier, suaver version of Jerry Lewis (remember "Buddy Love"?). He's the titular "Love God," complete with Nehru jackets, capes Vince Price would die for, sassily cocked fedoras, pink satin pajamas, five-pound astro-sign medallions, and an enormous bed with a scoreboard above it to keep track of his conquests.

Peacock — thanks to LaMonica's makeover — is seldom seen without the famous "Peacock's Pussycats," a quartet of ultra-femme fixtures who loll around his penthouse ... in lingerie ... and accompany him to Peacock Clubs around the world ... in lingerie ... and who dance around spontaneously ... in lingerie.

The foursome are African princess Toma (Nancy Bonniwell), vaguely Swedish blonde Ingrid (Shelly Davis), voluptuous redhead Sherry (A'leisha Lee), and Asian delight Delilah (Terri Harper).

MooT BackStory: Lee was actually A'leisha Brevard, a transexual of some repute at the time. She'd undergone transitional surgery in 1962, one of the first to do so in the United States. After the initial operation, Brevard worked as a drag queen using the name Lee Shaw, most notably at Finocchio's, a San Francisco club, doing Marilyn Monroe impersonations. Later, fully transformed, she worked as a stripper in Reno, and was a Playboy Bunny at the Sunset Strip hutch when she was cast in "The Love God?"

First up is my fave ... Ingrid. She's also in the purple fur ensemble and black teddy in the animation appearing at the beginning of this post.

The intrepid movie buff can watch "The Love God?" in its entirety online, in all its contrived Bilkoesque glory (courtesy director Nat Hiken), right here.

The meek among you can check out the extended trailer first, which features the addictive ode to the reluctant cocksman, "Mr. Peacock," sung by Darlene "Da Doo Run Run" Love, to music composed by prolific sitcom riff composer (or it that composter?) Vic Mizzy.

After his death in February 2006, Don’s daughter Karen selected "The Love God?" as the film she would most like her father remembered by. She pointed to the risk he took in mounting such a satirical attack on the morals of the nation during the Manson-Nixon era, especially after building a reputation as a family entertainer on "The Andy Griffith Show" and a string of successful G-rated comedies for Disney and Universal.

Between the lascivious female set decorations (who give the non-speaking eye candy in the Flint and Matt Helm movies a run for their money) and the references to the sexual revolution, pornography, and the Marquis de Sade, it’s obvious why this film made audiences who came to theaters expecting a "family film" cut from the same celluloid as "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" very, very uncomfortable. As a result, "The Love God?" bombed. A few years later, Knotts appeared in a TV special somewhat ironically titled "The Don Knotts Nice Clean Decent Wholesome Hour."

MooT BackStory: In the late Sixties, when Knotts — a notorious ladies man — was a regular at The Classic Cat, a popular L.A. topless joint, one of the club's dancers reportedly broke up with Jim Morrison (also a regular at the Cat) to date Knotts. And, yes, I mean *that* Jim Morrison. The stripper in question actually lived with Knotts, during which time he helped her kick a drug habit she'd picked up while with Morrison. Tinseltown legend also held that Knotts filled out his BVDs pretty well, and was in the same "human ruler" league as Berle and Dillinger. (But maybe not Warren Berlinger.)

How bizarre that a human pipe-cleaner with bug-eyes was able to out-mojo The Lizard King.

Truly incredible, Mr. Limpet.

Jean learning to ice skate with pillow on her butt at Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, on February 17, 1959.

Another shot from this series appears here.

(Unipix photo via United Press International.)

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "There's nothing wrong with Ellen. It's just that she loves too much."

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